# (8) 12 Mar 2010, 09:05AM: Cautiously Opening That Door:
A few weeks ago, another Indian-American and I were talking and agreed on one benefit of that particular childhood: if your parents are well-off enough to drag you to India & back a few times, you get used to long flights such that they're not much of a bother later in life.

This got me thinking about other advantages I got by dint of being born in the US to South Asian immigrants (educated middle-class ones, to be sure). That is, where did I get a leg up on children born to US-born white parents?

A few thoughts:

I had a hard-to-ignore set of lessons on intersectionality and multifaceted diversity. My parents aren't just Indian, they're Karnatakan Kannada-speaking Hindus from the Brahmin caste, and they didn't come from ease or wealth. And I'm leaving out some markers here: aesthetics, politics, culinary tastes, the places they've lived, the jobs they've had, their ages, what other languages they speak... I never could have believed that The Rest Of The World was a homogenous, forgettable mass.

From the start, I've had a taste of what it's like to be Other, or at least an edge case. My name didn't fit on forms. A classmate pointed to Indiana on a map and said, "That's where you're from!" A logic tutee, astonished at my US accent, said, "But you're Indian! ... Didn't you ever think that accents were innate?" Back when I was writing my newspaper column, after I wrote a piece about Indian-American TV shows, someone wrote in and complained that all I wrote about was "not being white." My parents looked hard and fast for US flags to put on their car and house after 9/11. And before that was the jerk in the car repair waiting room who called my mom a Satan worshipper, harassed her because of her kumkum (red dot on the forehead), and made her cry. Being brown in this majority-white country has given me a zillion anecdotes amusing and bemusing, from little irritations to strange, nebulous frustrations to disheartening dismay. So, the seeds of my reflexive sympathy for the underdog and pain-in-the-butt edge-case pedantry, check.

My parents spoke English and an indigenous Indian language (Kannada) at home. My parents could easily talk with my teachers and friends, but I also got sensitized from birth to the possibility of other tongues, other orthographies, and other ways of thinking. I sometimes wish I could go back in time and take my parents' Kannada lessons more seriously, but I couldn't see the point in it. Silly me. I do have ready access to study materials and practice partners should I wish to get fluent.

Growing up Indian-American tends to correlate with learning to handle spicy food. I in particular also grew up vegetarian. I never quite understood how omnivores could stare at vegetarians and ask, "but what do you eat?!" until I understood that, in the standard late-twentieth-century US meal, there is one high-profile meat chunk surrounded by bits of starch and vegetable for flavor and texture. If you think "vegetarian = removing meat chunk" then of course the plate seems empty. I grew up with a cuisine that gives beans, nuts, grains, leafy greens and other veggies first-class status.

Timezones. I was used to hearing people talk on the phone late at night, and got used to looking at the clock and quickly calculating the time n hours away. That's come in handy since.

Those are all effects I can at least take a stab at articulating. But I can only begin to think about the giant assumptions I take for granted, like "of course we've travelled abroad" and "this is a country of immigrants, Exhibit A, us" and the positive (and negative) effects of the Model Minority, doctor-or-engineer expectation. And I'm trying to limit this list to stuff common to middle-class US kids of professional-career South Asian parents (Canada seems rather different). I'm working towards some reminiscences specific to my dad and mom, but that's divergent.